Speakers at an advocacy meeting said on Tuesday in Rajshahi city collective effort has become an urgent need to substantial and sustainable reduction of
drug-addiction to free society from mental sickness.
The viewed all the drug addicts, especially the intravenous drug users, always suffer from mental sickness as the drugs damage their mental strength and the central nervous system in particular.
Terming the drug-addiction as the national problem, they said there was no alternative to creating mass-awareness to address the problem strictly.
They were addressing the meeting styled ‘Drug-addiction eradication and prevention of mental sickness’, organised by civil surgeon office at its conference hall as part of the nationwide campaign programme.
With the civil surgeon Shahidul Islam in the chair, deputy civil surgeon Azizul Islam, ward councilor of the city corporation Bilkis Banu, senior health education officer Sharifa Begum and medical officer Shahinuzzaman, spoke on the occasion as resource persons.
The discussants said the numbers of illicit drug users had increased significantly owing to availability of the drugs and as a result the drug-addicts were being transformed into patients of multiple diseases.
They said some macro environmental factors like poverty, homelessness, unemployment and various social stigmas are posing serious challenge towards mitigating the drug-addiction problem.
Civil surgeon said the government had adopted various time-fitting measures to free the vulnerable people from the drug endemic.
Anti-drug addiction messages are included in the religious study and social science text books from Class VI to X.
Awareness campaign through different media and training programs for law enforcement, health care and relevant NGO personnel is also progressing, he added.
Dr Islam, however, said close-coordination among different agencies was very important as the highly porous border made drug trafficking across the border easy.
-With New Age input
